Purgatory...with a capital 'P'

Land transfer:
Cassandra Prena '12 and Barbara Watkinson (right) check surviving landmarks on a copy of a detailed tax map prepared by Napoleon Bonaparte's tax department. The two were working in William & Mary's Center for Geospatial Analysis.

GIS reveals medieval land-transfer patterns

by Joseph McClain
| May 10, 2010

Prehistoric megalithic dolmens and menhirs
dot the landscape of Dénezé-sous-Doué. At certain times of the year, the fields
reveal lines that are congruent with boundaries of the narrow farm plots shown
on 200-year-old maps.

It's a place that has been continuously
populated for millennia. Barbara Watkinson says that even the place names in
this part of France have changed very little from medieval times to the
present. Watkinson brings together a collection of documents including
11th-Century monastic land records, Napoleon Bonaparte's tax maps, aerial
photographs, satellite imagery and modern maps to chart and explain the
transformation of the landscape in this particular area of western France.

Lessons in
data stitchery

At William & Mary's CGA, Stuart Hamilton
taught Watkinson and her student, Cassandra Prena '12, how to stitch their
data, using rubbersheeting and other relevant GIS techniques. They're focusing
their research on the transfer of property from lay to ecclesiastic ownership
during the 11th and 12th Centuries. Watkinson explained that landowners were regularly
prompted to donate real estate to religious authorities in exchange for prayers
to relieve the suffering of dead family members in the afterlife.

"Purgatory is where you go to be purified of
your earthly sins. About the middle of the 12th Century, purgatory started to
be spelled with a capital ‘P'. To them, it was a real place," Watkinson
explained. "Monks wrote and talked a lot about purgatorial torments. They used
it as a lever to motivate people to make donations to get the souls of their
parents and ancestors—and themselves—transferred out of the tormenting waiting
place to the nice waiting place. There are all these stories about spirits of
the dead returning to their children, telling them all these horrible details
about their suffering and pleading for them to go to the monks and follow
through on a gift of a farm or even a church."

Even though Watkinson had spatial data from
several eras, her work with the CGA revealed that her project required a
greater degree of accuracy. To this end, Watkinson and Prena walked the fields
and roads of Dénezé-sous-Doué about a year ago. Armed with a notebook, a
handheld GPS plotter and practical advice from Hamilton, professor and student
nailed down the x, y and z coordinates of the Dénezé commune.

"Stu told us to use something pretty
immutable to make our plots," Watkinson said, "not necessarily the kinds of
things we're interested in, but churches and roads. Their locations have hardly
changed over hundreds of years. What was a main road in the Napoleonic era is
still there, but now it's a dirt path."

Sowing seeds
of resentment

The redistribution of wealth in medieval
France has enormous cultural and historical significance, Watkinson said.
Through the lever of purgatorial paranoia, churches and abbeys gained more than
agricultural land, accumulating mills, tanneries and other industrial
properties—including, Watkinson says, "related indentured workers, the kinds of
people we came to call serfs." And of course, abbots, bishops and religious
orders grew richer and more powerful. Watkinson points out that while the
church was reaping the benefits of the landed gentry's concern for their
ancestors' afterlife, it was also sowing the seeds of resentment that grew into
the social and political upheaval of the French Revolution.

"The church became even more hated than,
perhaps, the monarchy," she said.